Susan G. Komen: Where’s the Party?

“I am writing to inform you that we have cancelled the Annual Awards Gala that was originally scheduled for May 17, 2012,” Blythe Masters, the chair of the board of directors for the Greater New York City affiliate of Susan G. Komen for the Cure, wrote in a letter dated yesterday. Now, why would that be? Instead of an event for which tickets might to sold to all sorts of people—some, presumably, still angry that the national Komen organization had tried to cut its ties to Planned Parenthood before pressure from its supporters made it reverse that decision—there would be another kind of event:

I would, however, like to cordially invite you to join me as my special guest at Keeping the Promise: The Grantees’ Breakfast, where we will announce our new 2012-2013 grantees…

The Grantees’ Breakfast; will, the letter noted, be “by invitation only.” (“Please note that this invitation is not transferrable.”) The Gala was supposed to be at Gustavino’s (“It’s been cancelled for reasons I can’t divulge,” someone speaking for Gustavino’s, who declined to give his name, said.) Vern Calhoun, a spokesman for the affiliate, said: “After much discussion, the Board of Directors of the Greater New York City Affiliate of Susan G. Komen for the Cure decided to postpone our new spring event, the Awards Gala, to a later date because we were not certain about our ability to fundraise in the near term.” Calhoun said that one of the grantees at the substitute breakfast event would be Planned Parenthood of Nassau of County; specifically, a program called Sisters United in Health/Hermanas Unidas en la Salud, which provides uninsured and undocumented minority women health information and access to breast-cancer screenings. (The grants total three million dollars, and another $1.4 million for research will be announced, Calhoun said.)

That concern about fund-raising may have been well founded. The letter was received by a friend who used to donate to Komen regularly but, like many others, had recently excoriated them on their Web site for interjecting politics into women’s health care. Other affiliates are reconsidering events, too.

All of this raises a question: who won the fight over Komen and Planned Parenthood? Komen’s support for the anti-cancer work Planned Parenthood does is in place, for now, at least while people are watching. But that uproar was followed by Rush Limbaugh’s pillorying of Sandra Fluke and attempts by the Republican candidates to outdo each other with invectives directed at Planned Parenthood, and even the basic principle of accessible contraception. “Planned Parenthood, we’re gonna get rid of that,” Mitt Romney said (he was apparently referring to getting rid of any federal funding, not outlawing it). The candidate whose views were most extreme in this regard, Rick Santorum, won the primaries in Alabama and Mississippi last night. Margaret Talbot, in a Comment this week, notes that “eighty new restrictions on abortion rights that were enacted by state legislatures in 2011, up from twenty-three in 2010.” But Planned Parenthood itself, and not just its abortion work, has become a target. Who won the Komen fight? It’s too early to tell; it’s still going on. There just won’t be any skirmishes at a gala in New York this year.

Illustration by Matthew Hollister.

Amy Davidson Sorkin has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2014.